Tornadoes require two main parts. The first being energy, which comes as warm, moist, unstable air from the Gulf of Mexico. The second is wind shear—a measure of how much the wind changes speed and direction between the ground and higher levels of the atmosphere. While climate change is increasing the energy in the atmosphere, it’s expected to reduce wind shear.
It sounds intuitive: Of course, global warming should lead to more—and more powerful—tornadoes. We’re adding energy to the atmosphere by trapping heat with greenhouse gasses, and tornadoes are the very picture of terrifying atmospheric energy.
Linking any particular weather event to climate change is always tricky, because weather is inherently random. But weather patterns can speak to a warming planet. Scientists can detect that extreme rain events, for instance,
are already happening more often than they used to, and that a warmer atmosphere with more water vapor in it is making such events more likely.
Tornadoes are different. Global warming may well end up making them more frequent or intense, as our intuition would tell us. But it might also actually suppress them—the science just isn’t clear yet.
Neither is the historical record.
There is no real evidence that tornadoes are happening more often. A lot more are being recorded now than in 1950, but a closer look at the data shows the increase is only in the weakest category, EF0. There’s been no increase in stronger twisters, and maybe even a slight decrease in EF4s and EF5s.
That suggests we’re just spotting more of the weak and short-lived tornadoes than we did back when the country was emptier (the United States population in 1950 was less than half what it is now), we didn’t have Doppler radar, and Oklahoma highways weren’t jammed with storm-chasers.
There is also no evidence that tornadoes have gotten more damaging, according to a study by Roger Pielke, Jr., of the University of Colorado and his colleagues. Even so, when you allow for inflation and increases in population and wealth in the United States, 2011 becomes the third worst year for tornado damage, after 1953 and 1965.
When National Geographic magazine asked “What’s Up with the Weather” in a cover story last September, we put a tornado photo on the cover and six pages of twister pictures inside including a large shot of the swath of destruction that an EF4 tornado cut through Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 2011, killing 64 people there and in Birmingham, Alabama.
But as writer Peter Miller made clear in that story, intuition is not a reliable guide to tornadoes.
Two Opposing Forces:
A tornado is a violently rotating column of air that is in contact with both the surface of the Earth and a cumulonimbus cloud or, in rare cases, the base of a cumulus cloud. It is often referred to as a twister, whirlwind or cyclone, although the word cyclone is used in meteorology to name a weather system with a low-pressure area in the center around which, from an observer looking down toward the surface of the earth, winds blow counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern. Tornadoes come in many shapes and sizes, and they are often visible in the form of a condensation funnel originating from the base of a cumulonimbus cloud, with a cloud of rotating debris and dust beneath it. Most tornadoes have wind speeds less than 110 miles per hour (180 km/h), are about 250 feet (80 m) across, and travel a few miles (several kilometers) before dissipating. The most extreme tornadoes can attain wind speeds of more than 300 miles per hour (480 km/h), are more than two miles (3 km) in diameter, and stay on the ground for dozens of miles (more than 100 km).
Since we’re changing the climate, the historical record is no more certain a guide to the future than intuition is. So what does physics tell us about the future of tornadoes in a CO2-warmed world?
“It really comes down to two ingredients in the atmosphere, in the environment in which storms form,” says Jeff Trapp, an atmospheric
scientist at Purdue University.
Trapp was on the road in Kansas and Oklahoma in late-May 2013, launching weather balloons into supercells—large, tornado-producing thunderstorms—as part of an effort to improve forecasting. He was 32 or 48 kilometers (20 or 30 miles) away from Moore when the tornado hit on May 20, 2013.
The first ingredient needed to make a tornado, he explains, is energy in the form of warm, moist, unstable air. In Oklahoma, that comes on southerly winds off the Gulf of Mexico.
The second ingredient is wind shear—a measure of how much the wind changes speed and direction between the ground and higher levels of the atmosphere. “Essentially that’s determined by the strength of the jet stream,” which blows in from the west, Trapp says. Wind shear causes the warm, rising air inside a supercell to start rotating, a necessary condition for organizing the storm and allowing it to spawn funnel clouds.
And that gets at the nub of the question surrounding a potential nexus between warming and tornadoes: Although climate change is increasing the energy in the atmosphere, it’s also expected to reduce wind shear.
That’s because the jet stream is powered ultimately by the temperature difference between Earth’s hot tropics and its cold poles, and that difference is decreasing with climate change, as the poles warm faster than the rest of the planet. So the same phenomenon that is rapidly melting the Arctic ice cap and marooning polar bears could lead to a weaker jet stream and fewer tornadoes.
But will it?
Severe thunderstorms can happen even when wind shear is lower, Trapp says.
“Really it’s the product of the two ingredients that matters most,” he says.
The big question, which he and a small number of other climate scientists have been trying to answer with climate simulations, is what will happen to the product of energy times wind shear—to the two ingredients combined—as CO2 continues to warm the world.
“What we find in the models,” Trapp says, “is there’s actually an increase in the product. The decrease in wind shear is more than compensated [for] by the increase in energy. This tells us that the number of days that support severe thunderstorms generically should increase.”
Still, that’s just one study. And it says that the future environment should favor the storms that create tornadoes—but not necessarily tornadoes themselves. It’s possible that in the future, severe thunderstorms will tend to spend themselves in violent hail or in straight-line winds. Neither is a pleasant prospect, but neither packs the damage potential of tornadoes.
Trapp is now at work on a study that will combine a global climate model with a local, high-resolution model, which will show tornadoes as if on a virtual radar screen.
This new study may offer a glimpse of what the future has in store for Oklahoma and other parts of Tornado Alley. Meanwhile, he said one thing with certainty: “The last several days in Oklahoma, both the wind shear and the energy have been incredibly large.”
In the early hours of December 11, 2021, a whole series of violent tornadoes tore through Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee. This was very unusual for this time of year. Tornadoes usually hit in the spring. And they usually hit further west in the US. And they are usually not this destructive. Many wondered if this spate of tornadoes was a new phenomenon. Specifically, they wondered if these tornadoes were caused by climate change. Does global warming cause tornadoes?
Even though it seems like global warming must be behind these new tornadoes, it isn’t the right answer. The real answer is that scientists just don’t know if global warming is linked to more and fiercer tornadoes.
A tornado spins in a field outside of Bennington, Kansas on 28 May 2013.Hurricanes, wildfires, flooding and pandemics are all becoming more prevalent as the world becomes warmer and are all clearly linked to global warming by a lot of solid evidence.
Tornadoes are different.
Climate scientists have not yet connected global warming definitively to tornadoes. It is definitely premature to say global warming causes tornadoes or even makes them more prevalent or more violent. The verdict on tornadoes is just not in yet.
We need to be accurate about what is happening to us. It makes the whole climate situation much worse to claim that climate change is behind every new disaster. We need to sort out what is actually happening from our fears of what may be happening.
Camera Captures the Moment Woman Finds Her Dog Alive After Tornado
Video that shows the massive tornado damage in Mayfield, KY on Dec 11, 2021.
WATCH: Mayfield Drone Videos Show the Tornado Damage | Heavy.com
Emergency-crews-search-through-a-flattened-Mayfield.
A-building-lies-destroyed-in-downtown-Mayfield-KY. December 11, 2021The New York Times says scientists are not sure if climate is linked to tornadoes.
“Tornadoes are relatively small, short-lived weather events. And scientists are not yet able to determine whether there is a link between climate change and the frequency or strength of tornadoes, in part because they have a limited data record.
But researchers say that in recent years tornadoes seem to be occurring in greater “clusters,” and that a so-called tornado alley in the Great Plains — where most tornadoes occur — appears to be shifting eastward.
“This is what we would call a tornado outbreak, where you have a storm system which produces a number of tornadoes over a large geographical area,” Dan Pydynowski, a senior meteorologist with AccuWeather, said on Friday.
But such a large and powerful system in December is highly unusual, and something the region usually experiences in May or April.
“It’s certainly not unheard of,” he said of tornadoes this late in the year,
“but to have an outbreak of this magnitude, with this many tornado reports —
it’s a little unusual for this time of year.”
Temperatures in Arkansas and Kansas on Friday were “spring weather,”
Mr. Pydynowski said. Highs were in the 70s and 80s.
“It was unusually warm, and there was moisture in place,” he said, “and you had a strong cold front end. These are the ingredients for big storms in the spring, but not in mid-December.”
Does global warming cause tornadoes? The answer is that at this time, scientists just don’t know.
The Washington Post says a warming world could add more fuel to tornadoes.
While the link between global warming and disasters like wildfires and flooding are more definitive, experts say, warmer temperatures could intensify cool-season thunderstorms and tornadoes in the future.
In the wake of deadly storms that ravaged parts of the South and the Midwest this weekend, scientists had a warning: While the exact link between climate change and tornadoes remains uncertain, higher temperatures could add fuel to these violent disasters.
As rescuers searched Saturday amid the rubble of violent tornadoes that barreled through multiple states, killed scores of people, and leveled homes and businesses, climate scientists said people around the world needed to brace for more frequent and intense weather-driven catastrophes.
“A lot of people are waking up today and seeing this damage and saying, ‘Is this the new normal?’ ” said Victor Gensini, a meteorology professor at Northern Illinois University, adding that key questions still remain when it comes to tornadoes because so many factors come into play. “It’ll be some time before we can say for certain what kind of role climate change played in an event like yesterday.”
Still, he said the warm December air mass in much of the country and La Niña conditions created ideal conditions for a turbulent event. Thunderstorms — the raw material for tornadoes — happen when there is warm, moist air close to the ground and cooler, drier air above, creating a path for humidity to travel upward.
In a warming world, Gensini said: “It’s absolutely fair to say that the atmospheric environments will be more supportive for cool-season tornado events.”
But Gensini and other climate and weather experts noted that tornadoes are among the most difficult events to link definitively to global warming, partly because they are relatively small and short-lived compared with the wildfires, heat waves and other climate disasters.
Wildfires are closely linked to increasing global warming. But does global warming cause tornadoes?
The answer is that at this time, scientists just don’t know.
More reading on tornadoes and climate.
Tornados are not hurricanes. Climate change is definitely making hurricanes worse. … A warming world could add more fuel to tornadoes, scientists say
Tornado Expert Explains Why the U.S. Just Saw One of the Worst Tornado Outbreaks in History … Is climate change fueling tornadoes?
We are now living in an era of uncertainty
Flooding linked to global warming but does global warming cause tornadoes? The answer is that at this time, scientists just don’t know.
Much of the natural world is still like it always has been.
Enjoy what we still have. We may lose it.
Global warming doesn’t cause tornadoes – Bing video
10 Worst Natural Disasters to Strike the U.S. (aarp.org)
The 10 Worst Tornadoes in US History – Fox Story India
List of natural disasters by death toll – Wikipedia
List of deadliest tornadoes in the US since 1900.
Officials have not yet determined how many people died in overnight tornadoes in several U.S. states — or exactly how many tornadoes struck.
A list of the deadliest tornadoes in the United States since 1900:
Most Prior to 1950: The seventh-worst took place 10 years ago, in May 2011,
when 158 people were killed by a massive twister that devastated Joplin, Missouri.
— 695 deaths. March 18, 1925, in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana.
— 317 deaths. May 6, 1840, in Natchez, Mississippi.
— 314 deaths – April 24, 2011 – The 2011 “Super Outbreak”
— 310 deaths – April 3, 1974 – The original “Super Outbreak”
— 305 deaths, May 27, 1896, in Missouri, Illinois and Kentucky.
— 260 deaths – April 11, 1965 – The Palm Sunday outbreak
— 224 deaths – April 20, 1920 – Alabama-Mississippi
— 216 deaths. April 5, 1936, in Tupelo, Mississippi.
— 203 deaths. April 6, 1936, in Gainesville, Georgia.
— 181 deaths. April 9, 1947, in Woodward, Oklahoma.
— 158 deaths. May 22, 2011, in Joplin, Missouri.
— 143 deaths. April 24, 1908, in Amite, Louisiana, and Purvis, Mississippi.
— 117 deaths. June 12, 1899 – in New Richmond, Wisconsin.
— 116 deaths. June 8, 1953, in Flint, Michigan.
— 114 deaths. May 11, 1953, in Waco, Texas.
— 114 deaths. May 18, 1902, in Goliad, Texas.
— 103 deaths. March 23, 1913, in Omaha, Nebraska.
A list of the top 10 worst tornadoes in Texas history (weather.gov)
Worst tornadoes in Oklahoma history – Bing
Worst tornadoes in Nebraska history – Bing
Mother Recalls Last Words to Son Who Died in Tornado at Amazon Warehouse (newsweek.com)
Midwest Saw Record-Breaking Twisters and Deadliest December Day in Tornado History (msn.com)
The death toll of Friday’s storm is expected to rise as assessments are done in towns along the path of the twisters, which stretches for hundreds of miles through the Mississippi Valley from Arkansas north to Kentucky.
See news about Worst Tornadoes in Ohio History
The Xenia, OH F5 Tornado – April 3, 1974 – Bing video
Here are 3 of the biggest tornadoes to come through Ohio:
April 11, 1965, was the second most dangerous single day for tornadoes in Ohio,
(The first happening in 1924). A total of 11 tornadoes were reported in those 24 hours. These tornadoes tore through Shelby, Preble, Greene and Fairfield counties, just to name a few. Tornadoes reached F4 conditions, according to Fujita ratings, and killed 60 people in total.
Possibly one of the most powerful tornadoes to ever hit Ohio happened in Xenia in 1974. There was a reported F5 tornado touchdown. A total of 32 people were killed from this storm, and most of the city was either damaged
or destroyed. >> PHOTOS: The 1974 Xenia tornado
The Montgomery/Blue Ash tornado tore through Ohio on April 9, 1999.
There were recorded F2/F3 damages left throughout the area. More than 500 homes were damaged along with the death of four people and multiple injuries.
Amazing Comebacks: The Time Tom Brady Upset #5 Alabama.
In the 2000 Orange Bowl the #8 Michigan Wolverines took on the #5 Alabama Crimson Tide. The Tide jumped out on top early, with Shaun Alexander scoring twice. This wasn’t too much for Brady though. In the second half he would later on tie it up at 28. On the first play of overtime, he would throw a touchdown, followed by a critical extra point. Alabama would score on their drive but then missed the point after. Michigan would win the game 35-34, Brady finished
34-36 for 369 yards and four touchdowns.